El Mina

February 16, 2008

Today has been a very long day. After waking up somewhere between hysteria and groaning we gathered all of our things and boarded the bus to head to the coast. Today I may have been a little camera happy. So far I’ve taken about 100 photos and that’s with most of the time being spent on a vehicle. Driving through the country has been interesting. You can tell when you are traveling into the cities by the increasing amount of small houses. Seems like most of the housing I’ve run into has been pretty basic, four walls, the outside brightly colored and elevated above the road by dirt mounds. There are goats and chickens everywhere. The surprising thing is that they are allowed to roam freely without their owners watching. No matter what they always return each day. There are also people everywhere, even along the long stretches of dirt highways where there is nothing but thick vegetation on either side. People set up little stands along the main roads hoping to sell some sort of fruit or good. The purpose of our traveling to the coast was to visit the largest slave trading post in African tropics. El Mina was originally built by the Portuguese as a trading station for spices, gold and other materials. However, they quickly realized that there was a larger profit to be made in the selling of people. The storage compartments that were used to house materials like gold, were repurposed to house Africans. They would house about 150 people in each area, where the tour group I was with felt uncomfortable with only 30. There were no windows to the outside, there were three doors which were only for the purpose of moving people and there was a hole that leads into the munitions room, which often leaked deadly fumes. The men and women were kept separate and were given two buckets for waste. They were fed one meal a day and were often abused by guards. The women seemed to have it the worst as their torture included rape. If the woman refused, she would be tied up to a chain in the middle of the court yard which was surrounded by the women’s cells and she would be given no food or water for a day. When the governor was feeling up to it, he would have all of the women released into the court yard and then he would select one to go to his chambers with him, after she was bathed, had brushed her teeth, was fed and hydrated. If she was lucky, she would become pregnant and she would be allowed to leave and raise the child outside of the castle. The hardest part was making the walk to the point of no return. Just thinking about how many people had made that walk before, squeezed through the tiny doorways, single file, and seeing their loved ones for the first time in two months, before being separated again and shipped to another country to be sold, was enough to give chills. The castle traded hands several times, once to the Dutch and another to the British. When the Dutch came they installed a church on the second floor above the women’s cells. They believed that God was in that church and they vowed to do His work and even had a passage from Psalms 132 above the entry, as they profited and oversaw the selling, imprisonment and torture of the very people that were the European’s original mission’s project. It’s been a tough day, but no less a good day.